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Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Submitted by Dan on October 10th, 12:20am

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines - it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”

Clay Jannon, a recently unemployed graphic designer, takes a job in an unusual bookstore in San Francisco. There he finds an interesting but small cast of characters: His boss, who has ordered him not to read any of the books on the shelves and the few customers he sees during his graveyard shift that "arrive with algorithmic regularity", without paying for the items they leave with. His curiosity gets the better of him and after opening some of the books he was ordered not to he stumbles on a 500 year old secret society.

Robin Sloan worked for a variety of technology companies over the last decade so this book is peppered with sentences like “He has the strangest expression on his face- the emotional equivalent of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.” It's hard to not like a book that talks about ancient secret societies on one page and merits of different programming languages on the next.